Commerce over networks, particularly e-commerce over the Internet, has increased significantly over the past few years. Part of e-commerce enables users/customers to access information of products and to purchase them from various commercial Web sites (i.e. online stores). There are numerous online stores currently operating in the Internet including Amazon.com, eToys.com, Buy.com, Wal-Mart.com, LLBean.com, and Macys.com. These online stores provide various customer services to make commerce activities possible over Web sites. Some of the examples of the basic services are catalogs of merchandise which are both browsable and searchable by various product attributes (e.g., keyword, name, manufacturer, and model number), shopping carts, and checkout process. Some online stores also provide advanced customer services such as wish lists, gift registries, calendars, custom-configuration of products, buyer's groups, chatting, e-mail notification, and in-context sales.
One experience of online shopping is that a shopper can easily move from one online store to another by pointing his/her browser to the store's hyperlink with any well-known input device (e.g. a mouse). This experience of online shopping appeals to price-sensitive consumers and deal-prone buyers for corporations and significantly contributes to its increasing popularity. Shoppers usually search the Internet/Web to find the best deals. Certainly, searching over the Internet for good deals is less laborious than visiting many brick-and-mortar stores in the physical world for products and their price information. However, the job can become easily tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, a shopper can never be sure if he/she finds the best deal without complete information about products and merchants. To help such shoppers in this situation, a new type of e-commerce Web site called an aggregator has appeared. An aggregator Web site itself is not an online store, but it provides a marketplace where a shopper can view aggregated information of merchandise from various e-commerce stores. Note that different aggregators use different business models. For example, while Yahoo! as an e-commerce aggregator provides shoppers with categories of merchandise and a gateway to the participating merchants' Web stores through their Yahoo! web site categories, other aggregators such as Priceline.com and eBay use different forms of auction to create a marketplace.
Another form of aggregators of interest is Web sites which provide comparison shopping services. These Web sites collect and compile information about products and online stores. When a user comes to the Web site and performs a price comparison for a product, the site provides a hit list of online stores with the best deals for the product of interest. Examples of these comparison shopping sites are MySimon.com and DealTime.com. We call these sites the “first generation” of comparison shopping. While these comparison shopping sites save shoppers the work of searching the Internet for good deals, they have one key weakness in that they require users to start shopping in their sites before they get to actual online stores providing the best deal. This weakness may not be critical to some users. However, as the online shopping experience gets deeper and broader, and as online stores provide more and more services and differentiate themselves from others, online shoppers tend to favor some stores over others in various shopping scenarios. The weakness of the first generation comparison shopping services will become serious for such online shoppers. Sometimes, such a shopper visits his/her preferred online store first to obtain information about products of interest, and then goes to a comparison shopping service site to compare the price of the selected products in other online stores and then decides in which store he/she wants to complete the purchase.
Recently, there are new types of comparison shopping services which resolve the weakness of the first generation services. We call them the “second generation” of comparison shopping services. Examples of the second generation services are RUSure, Clickthebutton, DealPilot, and zBubble from Alexa (an Amazon.com subsidiary). These new services do not require users to start shopping in their sites. In the first place, they are not Web sites at all. Rather, each of these services is a computer process running on the user's (shopper's) computer. For a user to have the service, he/she downloads and installs the program in their computer. The user can start shopping in his/her preferred online store and find information about the merchandise of interest in the store. While the user browses and searches products in his/her Web browser, the comparison shopping process automatically starts running and monitors Web pages the user views. (In this sense, the comparison shopping program is a type of software agent.) As soon as the user selects a product, the software agent program makes available a list of other stores with a better price. The user can select an online store from the list, and go to the store to complete the purchase. In summary, the user is able to get information about product(s) of interest in his/her preferred store (Store A), but purchase the product(s) from another store (Store B) providing a better deal with the help of the second generation comparison shopping program. Note that many merchants consider this type of behavior of the second generation services unfair or unethical, because online stores (e.g., Store B in our example) may use/abuse such a service to lead customers out of a competitors online store (Store A) to buy products through them (Store B).
Another prior art area for this invention is price negotiation or dynamic pricing in the Internet in the form of auction. Auction is a trading mechanism which is traditionally used for liquidating surplus at best possible prices. It enables a wide range of potential buyers to bid competitively for products at below-market prices. As the mechanism is adopted and popularized by many online auctioneers and merchants in the Internet for consumer trading, it evolves into many different formats. Internet auctions are broadly divided into two groups by seller type: person-to-person auctions where sellers are individuals and business-to-consumer auctions where sellers are businesses. Examples of online auctioneers of person-to-person services include eBay, Auction Universe, AuctionMac, Planetbike, and Yahoo! Auctions, and examples of business-to-consumer auctioneers include Egghead, Bid4vacations, Sotheby's and The Sharper Image. Also, auctions practiced in the Internet can be categorized by their format: standard (Chinese) auction where the highest bid wins for each item and bidding is open to the public, parcel bidding which lets bidders buy by the piece, Dutch auction where multiple copies of same product are available and all winning bidders pay the amount of lowest winning bid, reverse auction where a buyer picks a maximum price he/she would pay for the selected product and bids from sellers higher than this price will not be accepted, express auction which limits bidding time (often one hour), private auction which limits buyer and seller access to certain products, and bartering which trades one good for another and cashes payment balance value differences.